gun control

Americans don’t give away their freedoms willingly. And they’re especially unwilling to limit their liberties in response to arguments based in ignorance, sprinkled with condescension and moral superiority. So law-abiding gun-owners respond by “gunsplaining,” and they find that when they gunsplain, they tend to win. Ignorance is a plague, and the gun-rights community is eager to provide the cure.

We must protect children from having to act as moral guides until they are prepared to do so. And that means we must stop using their innocence — their lack of capacity for moral decision-making — as a substitute for moral authority. To do anything less isn't merely foolish; it's cruel.

Media and internet near-monopolies and a too big to fail bank, the largest credit card issuer in the country, have joined in another attack on the Second Amendment and brazenly announced their plan to undermine the Constitution to accomplish their goals.

Conservatives responding to the latest FedUp PAC poll are confident that President Trump’s voters are still behind him, with almost 89% saying that Republicans will hold their Congressional majorities in the 2018 elections. Less than 5% expect Democrats to win a majority which would give them the votes needed for impeachment.

What President Trump's proposal does is violate the Fifth Amendment to make it easier to violate the Second Amendment – a demonstration of just how far afield from the Constitution Republicans will stray when not securely moored to constitutional conservative principles.

Democrats are working with gun-control groups to find a way to politicize the Parkland, Florida killings to their advantage for November's midterm elections. Democrats don’t really want to do anything that will help identify and stop troubled people from killing, they want to milk these tragedies for political advantage and the GOP's squishy Capitol Hill leaders are ready to help them.

Too many of today’s young people are not being taught to see and appreciate what has made the world as good a place as it really is for them. They have no idea who designed the large and complex systems that produce the peace and prosperity they enjoy, no idea how those systems work, and no idea how much they can foul them up by knocking out pins and levers and constitutional amendments just because they’re angry.

Morality is society's first line of defense against uncivilized behavior. Moral standards of conduct have been under siege in our country for over a half a century. Moral absolutes have been abandoned as guiding principles. We've been taught not to be judgmental, that one lifestyle or set of values is just as good as another. We no longer hold people accountable for their behavior and we accept excuse-making. Problems of murder, mayhem and other forms of anti-social behavior will continue until we regain our moral footing.

As conservatives gathered at CPAC to celebrate a successful first year of the presidency of Donald Trump the President’s response to Nikolas Cruz’s crimes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School showed the limits of Trump’s commitment to conservative principles and the conservative agenda.

Remember these student hecklers when CNN and their colleagues decry how President Donald Trump has single-handedly ruined civil discourse. Trump mocking CNN as "fake news" caused far more media outrage than Hogg calling the NRA "child murderers." It will happen again and again. They are hell-bent on ridding this country of the Second Amendment, one tragedy at a time.

The ignorance on display regarding the Second Amendment and its history is troubling and is due to the fact that no one really teaches about our rights ensconced in our Constitution. They weren’t pulled from thin air but from the idea of natural law and the concept of human rights endowed by a Creator.

We disagree with politicians who reacted to the horrific school shooting in Florida by pleading “now is not the time” for a debate on gun laws. A debate on gun control and all policies that could help prevent such a traumatizing event from happening again is welcome. But it needs to be a real debate, and such a thing has been hard to come by. There are clashing values and competing rights contending here, so any debate will unavoidably include anger.

The Democrats, enjoying all the fawning media coverage, can’t resist the instant gratification of calling for gun bans. For the moment they feel like they occupy the moral and political high ground. But it won’t last. Americans don’t want their country turned into a “gun-free zone” in which they entrust their safety to an overweening and incompetent state, one that leaves them as exposed as the students at that Florida school. Nor do they want to be made to feel evil for exercising a constitutional right.

Our rights are not up for debate. But, as a courtesy, because talking is the way a free people should endeavor to solve problems, we should debate them anyway. Rational discussion beats the alternative – many of us are vets who saw the alternative overseas – even if the other side prefers emotional blackmail using articulate infants to bum rush their anti-civil rights policies.

While the anti-gun crowd demands that the federal government ban the AR-15 and any other gun that they think looks like an “assault weapon,” what the latest revelations about the government and police failures at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tell us is that, as things stand now, waiting for the police to come and protect you from the next Nikolas Cruz is a death sentence.

Ben Stein is an eminently sensible guy, but like many eminently sensible sounding proposals, his proposal that the United States government should ban the AR-15, and similar so-called “assault weapons,” is a cop-out to avoid fixing the real problem; parents and government officials who ignore and cover for antisocial, near feral, humans like Nikolas Cruz until they kill someone.

I speak as a lifelong non-gun owner when I say we ought not count on governmental control of firearms as a broad, asphalted, tree-lined avenue to the elimination of gun violence. It might be, in objective terms, that nothing short of resort to the old “superstitions” we thought were gone — prayers, confessions, sacraments — will help a bit. My advice to the gun-controllers and Harvard professors: Don’t laugh. There are more things in heaven and earth, evidently, Prof. Pinker, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Gun-control advocates have a singular obsession with guns — especially, a particular style of gun — and very little concern for proper enforcement or warnings systems or cultural trends that have led to mass shootings or mental health risks or how we cover these shootings. This rejection of holistic solutions exemplifies their real intentions and makes Second Amendment advocates rightfully suspicious.

People who believe human life is sacred do not extinguish it capriciously; they do everything in their power to preserve and protect it. People who do not believe human life is sacred can be more prone to base life and death decisions upon emotion, convenience, and hubris. Thus, when it comes to preventing mass violence, the answer is respect for life and self-control - not gun control.

What of a solution? It's not enough to proclaim "if you see something, say something." It's time to be radically proactive. At the minimum, that means protecting our schools with professionally trained armed personnel the way the Israelis do. Whether its terrorists or psychos, the threat must be stopped and it must be stopped now.